Put “free” in quotes as the West likes to see itself that way - “free” in a physical sense, but didn’t mean that the West is free in the K sense - psychologically speaking. Amazing that you didn’t even understand that, don’t you see that the Western world is stalling to resolve the horror of the war in the Ukraine - because of their fear of losing their invested interests? That was the point of the sentence… One, like you, is “free” in a limited sense to share each other’s viewpoints, without risking going to jail for 15 years, like in Russia, right?
Compassion is love, love of all, btw. And that is not something that is part of the self, therefore it is not a fragment.
We are the world. This is actually what we are. We are the reflection of each other. You are the world and the world is you.
Notice now all the reactions that come flooding in. Not one of those reactions is intelligent; they are all reactions of thought, either batting away the statement it has just met or trying to make some idealistic sense of it. If you have heard it before and intellectually agree with it, another reaction takes place. So in this very initial reaction of thought is the genesis of every war we have ever had.
Or there is just the statement and we leave it alone, we don’t do anything with it. And then what happens to our sense of concern?
If I simply read “We are the world” and then leave it alone, let it fade away like a branch flowing down a stream, my concern is unperturbed, neither strengthened nor weakened nor any other reaction. It is as if I’d never seen the statement – in one ear, out the other!
You said we are concerned primarily with ourselves and then with the extensions of ourselves, which takes in family, friends, nationality and all the rest of it, slowly our concern dissipating as the circle away from the centre gets larger and larger. But the world is the centre. The world is you. If you are born into a Catholic family, that’s the world and that’s also you; and when you rebel against Catholicism and become a Buddhist or an atheist, that again is the world and you. So there isn’t any part of you that is not the world. It is not you and the world. You are the world. Therefore any concern about the world from a centre that sees and feels itself separate from that world is nonsensical, pointless. It must always be limited and therefore divisive. The Russian will care about Russia and the Ukrainian will care about Ukraine. And those on the side-lines of it in Europe or China or Australia or USA won’t care about any of it unless it directly affects someone they know or threatens their own economic stability.
So you are the world. You are not a centre at all. Because the world itself has created that centre. You have not flown in from another planet.
As I see it: I am me (individual) and I am the world (collective). Both. A thousand people create a cathedral. It is both the collective work of the thousand and an entity unto itself. To say it is only the entity is to miss the forest for the tree(s), to say it is only the collective is to miss the tree(s) for the forest. For a worldview to be convincing, it needs to convincingly explain the relationship between the individual and the collective, the whole and its parts.
I definitely am more concerned with the individual than the collective. I tend to see the particular over the universal, and end up missing the forest for the trees.
To be an individual literally means you are not divided, that you have no fragments. But you know this isn’t true. In this divided world, you are just repeating the false party line that everyone else says and believes. The collective is just a reflection of the divided person, who wants to believe that he/she is an individual. So they say: “My self is the most important thing: “me”, “my” and “I”.” The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming - When they come for you, Nobody, what will you say? There are so many major wars going on right now: apart from the Ukraine, the rebels are still fighting in Myanmar. That was another horror. First, the soldiers raped and killed and then expelled the Rohingya. What was worse, the majority of the population were silent while this was happening. And then what has and is still happening in China, with the brainwashing, torture, and the expulsion of their remaining victims - the Uyghur people. Russia, China, Myanmar and so many other countries, are deeply involved in telling their population “what to think”, and their populations have been so indoctrinated and so fragmented that they are caught in that lie. And the truckers who invaded Ottawa here in Canada, crying “freedom” - the rise of the right. Meanwhile, there is the fact - at the same time - that so many people in the Western world are still more concerned with being “me” in spite of all that is happening in the world.
But there is no ‘I’ to see anything. All it can do is react. This ‘I’ is the same ‘I’ right across the whole world. When you say, ‘As I see it,’ you are allowing a limited field from one corner of the world to speak. But it can only speak from what it knows, which is a reaction.
So is it possible to put aside everything we know and look again? Then concern has a totally different quality to it. It is not limited by what we know.
How can you state that there is no “I” to see anything, when you have also stated that you are afraid? Were there no “I”, there wouldn’t be any fear… the “I” is a component of fear, right? Were there no fear, thought (“I”) would not be contradicting itself.
The politicians in the Russian cabinet are terrified of Putin. One has seen one on TV suggesting something different to what Putin was stating, so Putin went at him sadistically until he repeated exactly Putin’s words - the guy was terrified, and like all the other politicians, they vote whatever Putin wants, so this guy is part of what is killing others. That is reality. One may say that the “I” is an illusion, but the facts remain that this illusion is killing others (whether by their tacit complicity or directly).
So, very innocently , Charley asks: how can an illusion (which isn’t real) be capable of killing another? The human body is real, eh?? Can someone - in a conversation - convince another that the “I” is an illusion? One doesn’t believe that for one second. It cannot be seen (and understood) through that kind of verbal exchange, especially when both parties have intact "I"s - selves, for another word. You see, one can brainwash another to believe that the “I” is an illusion, but that is just propaganda. And because this gullible blockhead has been brainwashed, they will just repeat what the brainwashing told them what to believe, “what to think”. There is more to understanding that the “I” is an illusion than simple verbal manipulation, by another.
I strongly doubt it, based on both experience and reasoning.
We can be aware of some of what we know. In the light of awareness, knowledge’s ability to carry out its program in stealth mode is diminished, in turn lessening its power over us. Perhaps with great passion and perseverance, a high percentage of our conditioning can be put aside. (Or not, I don’t know.) But that, it seems to me, is as free of ‘everything we know’ as it gets.
You are listening to certain statements only, and therefore you are listening selectively. You are listening and looking for the flaws in an argument that does not even exist. You have not gone on this journey with me, for whatever reasons you may have. You have dropped in and out of the conversation. So your question cannot be answered fully unless we start again right from the beginning. We have gone beyond fear into something quite different. But fear was there at the start, as I said, and we have stuck with it. By sticking with it, the feeling of it, the energy of it, one discovers its cause and its ending.
We are all afraid of the world in which we live. This is an undeniable fact, unless one has the kind of stupid mind that denies its own feelings. But fear has many facets. There is fear of the world and there is fear for the world; there is being afraid of what might happen to oneself and there is being afraid of what might happen to humanity. It is only when these two currents of fear come together as the same stream of energy that we find out what it means to be concerned about the world. Then there is no contradiction.
Then it is worthless. It is not really doubt at all if it has its roots in experience. It is just the voice of the past saying, ‘Leave me alone. Don’t make me look.’ You can’t doubt something you have never tried before. You may doubt your own capability, which is another matter, but the whole point about this kind of question is that all the capability, all the power of it, is in the question itself. We don’t know what we are capable of. The past knows, experience knows and reason knows - but the question is asking us to try something else, something quite new.
New to me doesn’t mean independent of the past. What happened gives way to what happens, sometimes subtly, other times overtly. There’s no getting around that, unless you deny causality. One way to look at this is that nothing is new, it’s all the past rearranged. But I prefer to think everything is new, unprecedented, unique. If you do 100 versions of a story, you bring 100 new stories into the world. You can never step in the same river, have the same experience twice.
You and I have a very different feeling for / understanding of the past.
The more we know - the more we can be confused by the jumbly-up concepts in our heads.
A bit like a theist trying to prove the existence of god via quantum physics.
Or a mystical psychologist trying to prove that everything is illusion based on the theory of relativity.
Or someone confusing statements about mechanical engineering with the workings of the human psyche.
If we are lost and confused, if we don’t understand whats goings on, whats the point of throwing a bunch of words at the situation?
nb. There is geological time, there is historical time, there is space/time, there is tea time, there is the tick tock of the grandfather clock, and there is me, motivated by psychological time - my memories and my goals. The word time has been used many times in this sentence but they don’t mean the same thing all the time.
You are the past. And you want to control the future. So of course you would rather have a hundred versions of yourself than disappear altogether. That’s all it means. But while there is even one psychological version of yourself active in the world you will remain in conflict with everyone else, even with those whom you apparently love and respect. You are the world. You don’t need a single shoddy version of yourself.
It is this version of yourself that hears ‘You are the world’ and reacts to it. The entire reaction is based on the belief that you are something else, something outside and separate from the world, something unique and special and sacred. Even someone who is confused, lost and afraid has this belief buried deep inside them, hoping one day to turn the dross of stupidity into the gold of enlightenment. This too is just the past waiting for its chance to control the future.
The past can never understand itself; it is gone, dead. And all our feelings for the past are similarly dead. We are alive now on a beautiful earth. Unless we begin to feel and understand the immensity of this one simple, blazingly obvious fact we shall carry on killing both the earth and the people upon it.
Or clarified by the insights into the mystery that, together, help illuminate the mystery. It all depends on what we do or don’t do with what we know. For me, part of knowing is knowing, down to the bones, that I don’t ultimately know pretty much anything!
Yes! I am a phase (transitional) of the process that was me at birth, 20 years ago, tomorrow, at death. This applies clearly to the physical (my body) as I assume you’d agree. But where we diverge: For me, it applies also to the mental (my psyche).
, Charley asks: how can an illusion (which isn’t real) be capable of killing another? The human body is real, eh?? Can someone - in a conversation - convince another that the “I” is an illusion? One doesn’t believe that for one second. It cannot be seen (and understood) through that kind of verbal exchange, especially when both parties have intact "I"s - selves, for another word. You see, one can brainwash another to believe that the “I” is an illusion, but that is just propaganda. And because this gullible blockhead has been brainwashed, they will just repeat what the brainwashing told them what to believe, “what to think”. There is more to understanding that the “I” is an illusion than simple verbal manipulation, by another.